Foreign Correspondence

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Bush's way into Venezuela

Colombia discovers petroleum deposits near Venezuelan border

Bush has for a long time wanted to seize the Venezuelan oilfields. Since most of the fighting in Colombia centers on their pipelines these Colombian petroleum deposits discoveries near the Venezuelan border will probably see much violence and spillover into Venezuela giving Bush a shot at ousting Chavez.

-Am


Background:

The hypocrisy of Bush's "war on terrorism" is apparent for all to see in Colombia where Bush proposes to spend $98 million to protect Occidental Petroleum's 480-mile-long pipeline which runs from Colombia's second-largest oil field to the Caribbean coast. The $98 million will follow the $1.3 billion the U.S. has already given to Colombia, ostensibly to fight the "drug terrorists." In 2001, the Cano Limon pipeline was closed for 266 days, due to holes blasted in it. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels have blown holes in the pipeline for the past fifteen years, resulting in 2.5 million barrels of spilled oil oozing into Colombia's rivers and streams, about ten times the amount of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

If Bush enters this 38-year old conflict in Colombia which has resulted in 40,000 deaths in the past decade, he'll be involving the U.S. in a dead-end power struggle among FARC, the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army (ELN), ultra-right paramilitary groups and the U.S.-supported fascist government. The excuse for spending U.S. taxpayers' money in Afghanistan was that Bin Laden was responsible for the September 11th attacks. Now the only pretext for spending taxpayers' money in Colombia is to combat the FARC and ELN "terrorists" who only threaten U.S. oil company resources, not American lives.

Invading Colombia follows the British-U.S. oil imperialism pattern: going where the oil is. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Colombian oil production rose from only 100,000 barrels per day in the early 1980s to approximately 844,000 barrels in early 1999 -- an increase of nearly 750 percent. Colombian oil exports to the United States have also risen sharply, and today Colombia is this country's seventh largest supplier of petroleum. Colombia harbors large reserves of untapped oil and natural gas, possibly as much as 20 billion barrels (and Venezuela has 73 billion barrels in proven reserves); hence Colombia--and its oil-rich neighbor countries--become one of many new oil imperialism targets. The United States imports more oil from Colombia and its neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador, than from all of the Persian Gulf.

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Colombia discovers petroleum deposits near Venezuelan border

12:38, July 02, 2005

Colombia announced on Friday the discovery of two new petroleum deposits in the department of Arauca on the Venezuelan border.

The discovery was initially revealed by the governor of Arauca, Julio Acosta Bernal.

According to Acosta, in the two municipalities where the new deposits were found, exploration is undertaken by US oil firm OXYand Spanish firm Repsol.

Colombian Mining and Energy Minister Luis Ernesto Mejia confirmed the discovery but remained cautious, saying it is too soon to make calculations on the potential of the deposits or to tell whether the deposits are commercially exploitable.

In the 1980s, OXY found in Arauca department the Cano Limon deposit, one of the most important in the history of the country and from which great volumes of petroleum are still being extracted.

An important decrease in crude production has been reported as of lately in Colombia and it is estimated that by 2009 the country will have to import petroleum.

Source: Xinhua





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